This paper traces narratives of displacement by al-maghmureen (the drowned), Syrian tribal pastoralists, farmers, and fisherpeople whose villages were submerged under water by the construction of the Euphrates Dam project in the 1970s, one of the hallmarks of the Baath Party’s vision for state-led agriculture in Syria. Some of the maghmureen were given small tracts of land in compensation by the Syrian state, others became employees of state-owned farms along the Euphrates River (later privatized in the early 2000s), and others remain uncompensated until today. Meanwhile, Lebanon hosts over one million Syrian refugees, many of whom are actually displaced former labor migrants. Based on interviews with displaced Syrian maghmureen now living as refugee-farmworkers in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, I trace how their contemporary displacement as refugees is connected to a lifetime of changing labor conditions and migration patterns paralleling shifts in the agrarian political economy of Eastern Syria. In particular, I consider how the case of the maghmureen links to classic debates on proletarianization within agrarian studies, which treat the rise of waged labor among dispossessed peasants as a key index of capitalism in agriculture. Combining ethnographic data with analysis of texts from the Marxist Syrian historian Abdullah Hanna and the Raqqan novelist Abdulsalam Ojaili, the paper traces shifts in land use-rights adjacent to the Euphrates River from the Ottoman-era practice of wad’ al-yad, to state-owned farms in the 1970s, and eventually privatized parcels during Syria’s infitah period. It was during the period of privatization, I argue, that waged labor migration among the maghmureen increased significantly, well before the Syrian uprising and subsequent war began in 2011. By focusing on the link between labor, property, and migration in the lives of the maghmureen, the paper aims to bring a nuanced historical perspective to the differentiated histories of displaced Syrians in Lebanon, whose conditions are usually generalized in terms of the recent wave of refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict. The paper concludes by considering how the contemporary language of “Syrian refugee crisis” occludes these longer histories of agrarian transformation, casting a critical perspective on what kinds of displacement are seen today as worthy of political repair or historical redress.

In his chapter titled “The Agrarian Question in Palestine,” the Israeli Marxist, Tony Cliff, once claimed that the structural economic problem in the Middle East is inseparable from the agrarian one. Cliff’s first-hand account of agrarian social relations never specifically became mainstream, but Marxists and non-Marxists alike have continued to perpetuate Cliff’s trope: social relations in the nineteenth-century Palestinian countryside were ‘feudalist,’ originating from “the heritage of the middle ages.” From the 1970s to the 1990s, scholars have repackaged this modernization narrative to make three related claims: First, that the Ottoman social formation was one of pre-capitalism, whether feudalism or sharecropping. Second, that the root of the conflict between Arab peasants and Zionists in Palestine is found in the incompatibility between Ottoman pre-capitalist and Western capitalist social relations. Third, that outside sources – e.g. the French-inspired 1858 Ottoman Land Code, British officials, or Jewish immigrants – brought capitalism to Palestine, defined by the presence of private property and free wage labor. The private papers of landowning companies, Ottoman land records, and peasant petitions provide the basis to argue for a very different answer to the agrarian question in Palestine. Incorporating secondary literature from the field of new capitalist studies, I challenge all three of the major claims outlined above: first, against the teleology that poses social relations in Palestine were pre-capitalist, I argue that these relations were wholly capitalist in the Marxian-Smithian and Weberian sense. Nineteenth-century landholding companies employed sharecropping techniques to be the most efficient form of capital accumulation and to be competitive on the global market. While familiar with forms of wage-labor, the companies chose to employ sharecropping as a strategic response to labor scarcity in the region while also viewing peasant labor as depersonalized, objectified, and ‘thing-like.’ Second, I contend that in this capitalist system, conflict was therefore not between ‘non-Western’ usufruct and ‘Western’ private property, but instead a contest over the shape of private property as entitlements, privileges, and obligations tied to rights on agricultural land – one that continues today. Third, I maintain that capitalism in Palestine evolved in much of the same way it did elsewhere, though local and global exchange. It did so at the initiative of local companies in their interaction with the world market and micro interactions between companies, peasants, and Jewish immigrants. The latter did not build, but rather inherited capitalist institutions of a particular kind in Palestine in the post-WWI era.

Rural social relations have been absent from the scholarship on Lebanon and Syria for decades. That neglect has been particularly severe in the U.S. academy. This paper will consider why the agrarian question faded from scholarly agendas based on a reassessment of the history of World War I. The war saw a massive transfer of capital and land away from Mount Lebanon's laboring classes as a direct result of the wartime famine. Rather than an anomalous tragedy, the war featured an intensification of an ongoing process of capitalist dispossession in the countryside. Why have historians, including Marxists, not perceived this social dimension of the pivotal years that preceded Lebanon's creation in its contemporary borders? Instead of relying on the memoir accounts overwhelmingly produced by elites that have predominantly informed studies of the period, this study reconstructs the war based on contemporary manuscript sources from private archives in Lebanon. The paper will highlight social relations in the kaza of Kisrawan, in particular, based on the relevant land registers housed in the archive of the University of the Holy Spirit in Kaslik, Lebanon. These diaries, letters, and title deeds reveal that the main conflict, as it was experienced at the time, was a class struggle internal to Beiruti and Lebanese society. That conclusion speaks to one key question of Middle East studies: why has class analysis been so neglected relative to the literature on Latin America and South Asia? In Lebanon, the particular neglect of rural social relations owed much to restrictions on access to archives that revealed the painful conditions, like the famine, under which land and capital changed hands. The national land register remains closed. The same ownership class of the late Ottoman period retained its power throughout Lebanon's history and was able to keep archives closed for over a century. The current period of archival openness and renewed willingness among academics to use class as a lens could signal the return of the agrarian question.

This paper explores the convergence of agrarian change and settler colonial land dispossession during the 1980s in the West Bank. Drawing on interviews with villagers, lawyers, economists, and agronomists; archival materials; and Palestinian technical publications, it shows how Palestinians developed tactics and practices to defend land in the context of radical transformations to rural political economy and land law. I trace how a logic agricultural productivity created by law and market shaped these struggles, generating its constitutive tensions, limits, and possibilities. Processes of state land seizure and colonization became enmeshed in agrarian class formation after the 1967 occupation. Beginning in the 1970s, peasants were rapidly absorbed into Israel’s industrial economy as wage laborers, reducing the importance of rain-fed agriculture for village social reproduction. After 1979, the Israeli state introduced the doctrine of “state lands” to the West Bank, confiscating untitled land deemed to have been uncultivated for 10 years. As a result, productivity became a problem for Palestinians as rural producers facing rising costs and market competition, and as property owners whose control of land was now directly hitched to its use. Throughout the 1980s, agrarian land defense emerged as Palestinians began to develop novel approaches to agriculture, markets, and labor. Palestinian agronomists and economists elaborated a set of interventions that (they hoped) would bolster the economic viability of West Bank agriculture to slow, if not reverse, labor migration and land loss. Village residents shifted from field to tree crops and organized collective efforts to make due with market pressures. And youth volunteer organizations provided support with harvests and land reclamation, seeking to build collective efforts that would encourage the youth to return to agriculture. Agrarian land defense sought to define and discipline actions, needs, and desires that could make different forms of collective life possible in and against the compulsions of law and market. It took neither resistance or rural sociality as unchanging or natural. Instead, it emerged as people and groups dealt with tensions between private property and the national territory and divergences in individual and collective aspirations. I conclude this paper by considering how the contemporary fragmentation of collective politics and the slow collapse of West Bank agriculture has spurred critical scholars and political actors to remember, reconfigure, and mobilize the pasts of agrarian land defense.

Between the 1960s and late 1980s, social and economic historians of the Ottoman Empire engaged in the “çiftlik debate’’. Çiftliks were large landed estates formed between the 17th and 19th centuries and interpreted as either a symptom of corruption of the so-called Ottoman classical land regime or a reflection of the Ottoman integration into the world economy. As intellectual and academic interest in rural history faded away starting in the 1990s, so did the debate. Focusing on the expansion of çiftliks in the river basins of Western Anatolia between the 1850s and the 1910s, this paper calls for a revival of the debate in the context of capitalist transformations in the late Ottoman Empire. Based on an eco-critical reading of Ottoman archival materials, this paper, argues that expansion of çiftliks played an instrumental role in the commodification of nature, the eradication of rural commons, and reinforced rural ecological segregation, ultimately becoming a defining feature of Ottoman capitalism in the rural space. This paper approaches Western Anatolian river basins as commodity frontiers of global capitalism, and view frontiers not only as zones where commodities were exchanged but in which capital and power put nature into work in order to extract value out of it. The opening of the frontier for resource extraction and capital accumulation prompted struggles among various actors over the control of the environment, producing new class distinctions in the process. Ample opportunities provided by global commodity markets and the concurrent expansion of railway networks starting with the 1850s brought the river basins of Menderes and Gediz into the extractive remit of the new actors who held economic and/or political capital. Ottoman and foreign merchants, global trade companies, members of notable families, local authorities, and the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II himself through the local branches of Hazine-i Hassa Nezareti (the Ministry of the Sultan’s Treasury) opened previously communally used pastures and woodlands to commercial agriculture by enclosing and converting them into çiftliks. While owning or lacking capital became a crucial medium for how human interacted the environment, this paper demonstrates that control of nature for resource extraction via formation and expansion of çiftliks tied rural communities to particular places while divorcing them from control over the land and environment, and depriving their access of rural commons.